When Children Play With Fire

November 14, 1992

In the dramatic newspaper photograph, a firefighter dangles a toddler from a ladder, the fireman's face obscured by smoke. The tot survived, but his three siblings died in the fire Tuesday in Holyoke, Mass., 20 miles north of the Connecticut border.

Those children were the latest victims of a growing hazard: unsupervised children playing with cigarette lighters.

The fire was started by children igniting hairspray with a butane lighter. Their parents apparently weren't around to stop them. The torch-makers on the first floor created a firetrap for children four floors above. Their deaths brought to at least five the number of people killed since 1987 by lighter fires in the city once dubbed the arson capital of Massachusetts.

Nationally, 126 people -- 80 percent of them preschoolers -- died in 1990 from fires set by children playing with lighters. In Connecticut, lighters burned at least a dozen schools and seven other buildings in 1991. Hartford's fire department includes lighter safety in fire-prevention programs in the public schools.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission is considering whether to require all lighters to be child-proof. Bic Corp. of Milford has spent six years and $16 million designing a lighter with a "child guard," which it has introduced.

But a chief factor in child-set fires remains adult negligence. Although firefighters acted heroically in the Holyoke rescue, heroics can only do so much to save lives if adults leave lighters lying around and leave children alone to play with them